Rome Doctors Demonstrate To Protest New Care System

Published: December 17, 1992

ROME, Dec. 16—
About 20,000 doctors, many of them wearing white physician's coats, marched through the streets of Rome today to protest a proposed health care program that would eliminate thousands of jobs.

The plan seeks to streamline Italy's public health care system. It will allow for more private practice, and will require richer citizens to cover a larger share of their health care costs.

The plan would completely restructure the Local Sanitary Units, the basic unit in Italy's public health care system. The number of those units would be cut from 672 to about 100 under the new law.